Jinny Blom: An Interview with the Author of 'What Makes a Garden'

The second book from landscape designer Jinny Blom, What Makes a Garden, draws on all aspects of gardens and garden culture. Jinny knows her stuff, has opinions, and sometimes upsets those of her followers on social media who want only loveliness. Having praised the writing of provocateur Julie Burchill (who wrote in her Spectator column, “It’s time to end the rewilding menace”), Jinny was shocked by the viciousness of the response. It seems that some things are off-limits for landscape designers, and one is suggesting to gardeners that their ecological thinking might be fuzzy. Never more in demand, with clients who could choose anybody in the world, Jinny takes time out to talk to us about garden design, and the R-word.

Photography by Britt Willoughby Dyer, from What Makes a Garden.

Q: In your latest book you say: “We limit spaces between trees and shrub groups to 650 feet as that is as far as many small birds can fly without having to take cover.” How much do ecological considerations affect the layout of your gardens?

A: An awful lot. We work very closely with ecology, and detailed information like this determines much of what we do. We just amalgamate the information into our designs rather than having it displayed only as the science.

Q: Does the term “pleasure garden” still have currency today?

A: I don’t know, because I’m not sure what’s happened to pleasure—we’re living in grumpy times. I personally feel that gardens are places for pleasure, which I would define as the sort of freedom that you get from being outside—not signaling every move and every action—but just sort of being. My sense is that the old meaning was just that: in the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens [which had their heyday in 18th and early 19th century London], you would be strolling around—pleasurably dressed, with pleasurable friends doing pleasurable things in a pleasurable place. Pleasure was the whole purpose.

Q: Do you find that more and more people are still getting switched on to gardening, even post-pandemic?

A: Definitely. Because here’s the crux of it: If you actually go outside and do it, your feelings and your responses to nature and gardening change very quickly. If you’re a kind of armchair warrior, then that’s something different. But really gardening—everybody I know who does it finds so much pleasure and excitement in it. The great optimism is giving people access to their own little patch of earth to mess around with; I think it’s very important.

Q: “Rewilding” means different things to different people. What in your view are the good bits?

A: I don’t see it as a big political thing, another cause for rage. It’s been going on for a very long time—people naturalizing areas or enjoying a naturalized area, except that it would be gardened and cared for; it would be ‘kempt,’ rather than unkempt. Anybody with a patch of land (I do it myself in my tiny garden) could have a patch of long grass with things growing in it. It’s not something you’re fiddling with all the time, it performs in a different way, and it gives a different kind of pleasure to look at. And then, five feet to the left, there might be quite a well-attended border, which is doing something else. So really, it’s about the pleasure of diversity in gardens. Anything that’s going to engender more habitat or more diversity for other creatures is definitely part of where most gardeners are coming from.